You expect a newspaper story to answer the sorts of questions you might ask your neighbour if you met him in the street and he had some interesting news. If he told you about a murder you would want to know where it happened and whether there were any suspects. Naturally, you'd be curious about the name, age and work of the victim, whether he was married, whether he had children and so on. Newspaper stories usually answer these sorts of questions in the telling. Sometimes they also answer the kind of question you would hesitate to ask.

Stories in newspapers, like other narratives, use biographical details to engage readers and satisfy curiosity. Since verification is a basic requirement of journalism these details also function to back up the story. On the other hand irrelevant details can jar with readers. Take the example of the story, at the end of last year, which reported that a man killed his wife at their home and then killed himself. "Officers had gone to the £700,000 bungalow in West Chiltington," readers were told. "The valuation is a distraction from the story," a reader objected. She may be right. A plethora of newspaper articles and television programmes about houses suggests that while we may have looked like a nation of shopkeepers to Napoleon, we now talk like a nation of property developers.

What ought to be left out of a story on ethical grounds? A clause about discrimination in the Press Complaints Commission's Code of Practice provides some guidance: "Details of an individual's race, colour, religion, sexual orientation, physical or mental illness or disability must be avoided unless genuinely relevant to the story," it says. I was reminded of this provision by a reader who complained about a report on the death of radio broadcaster Kevin Greening. "What does the fact that Kevin Greening was gay have to do with his death?" she asked. The journalist agrees this is a valid criticism. "However, at the time I felt the reference to Greening's sexuality was a biographical detail which merited a mention," he said. "It was not mentioned with any prejudicial intent but was part of a final paragraph which served as a brief obituary, bringing some details of his life, career and character to the fore."

The value of someone's property is, of course, in a different category to his sexuality. The reader who objected to the inclusion of the house price in the crime report mentioned earlier took issue with a property valuation in another article which reported that police officer Garry Weddell, who was due to stand trial for the murder of his wife, had killed his mother-in-law and then himself while on bail. Readers were informed that it is unusual for murder suspects to be granted bail and that Weddell's brother, a barrister, had agreed to stand surety of £200,000. Weddell's brother, we were told, "offered to put him and the couple's three children up at his £800,000 home." The reader thought this was an irrelevant detail. "I guess it has become a knee-jerk reaction to include the price of a property every time one is mentioned," she said.

In their book, The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel suggest that news stories are more dynamic, more engaging and less frozen in time when journalists ignore the old mantra: "Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How?" and think instead in terms of character, plot, setting, motivation (or causation) and narrative. The journalist who wrote the Weddell story seems to have adopted a similar approach. He gives good reasons for including the value of the property and argues the case for more detail eloquently. "Details change who people are and the dynamics of the story," he told me. Information indicating wealth and social status was included to tell readers something about the people involved and the circumstances in which bail was granted. "Unless there is a sensitive reason for not including information you have a duty to include all pertinent facts, to create as whole a picture as possible," he said. You can't quibble with that. It's an approach that does not exclude the requirement that details should be closely connected to the subject matter of the story.